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Factor 5 president Julian Eggebrecht has said that games'
inability to include sexual content, satirical jokes and
fantasy violence without degrees of censure are symptoms of a
wider problem with ratings - and said that he didn't feel the
US Entertainment Software Ratings Board (ESRB) took the
medium seriously as an artform.

"I would be happy if in games we could talk about
homosexuality, but we're not even at the point where we can
admit that humans have heterosexual relationships, and that
is a real problem - and it tends to show that games are not
being seen, even by our own ratings boards, as an artform,"
he told attendees at the Games Convention Developer's
Conference in Germany.

Eggebrecht devoted much of his keynote address on the first
morning of GCDC to attacking the US Entertainment Software
Ratings Board (ESRB) over ratings problems encountered
developing PS3 title Lair, and drew attention to various
examples.

One of these was a satirical video of a real-life coffee
maker hidden behind a cheat code in Lair - a reference to the
presence of unfinished sexual content in the original release
of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. "Everyone thought it was
hilarious...but we couldn't call the cheat 'Hot Coffee',
because that would imply we were mocking the authorities
investigating Hot Coffee."

"If you cannot have satire about these things, that is
approaching the realm of McCarthyism," he said.

In a speech that regularly drew comparisons between the use
of violence and sex in film and videogames, Eggebrecht called
on his fellow developers to include more sexual content in
games. "I want to see a game with real sexual content in a
store here in Germany - I don't think it will happen unless
we really recognise games as an artform," he told the
audience. He pointed to Stanley Kubrick film Eyes Wide Shut,
which "discusses relationship issues that you have in a
marriage". "You don't have that in games - it is time to wake
up and make it happen."

It was during this phase of his speech that Eggebrecht
referred to Hot Coffee, defending embattled publisher
Rockstar. "How a game can be drawn off the shelves based on a
cheat in which you can barely see something that might be
interpreted as a sexual act - as an Easter Egg no less - is
absolutely beyond me, when at the same time movies have been
pushing the envelope for a long time," he said.

Eggebrecht also called on the ESRB to introduce a new
American rating between the Teen and Mature badges, arguing
that neither was suitable for games like Lair whose innate
appeal is to teenage gamers, but whose content is fantasy
violence that can be viewed from custom angles - something of
a sticking point for censors.

Factor 5 had been forced to excise various elements of Lair's
violence because, while publisher Sony sought a Teen rating,
the ESRB repeatedly objected to spurts of blood and organic
aircraft being blown into visible "chunks", forcing the
developer into a time consuming and "hugely problematic"
cycle of submissions, Eggebrecht said.

"On the one hand they objected to this, but they let us
through with a Teen even though you can use fire - you can
set up to five, six thousand people on fire. They burn, they
run around and they scream, but of course that wasn't a
problem [due to the absence of blood]."

He called the submissions process "a charade," saying: "It's
a flat out bizarre system...It makes it even harder for games
than movies because we don't have the intermediate ratings."
Although there were obvious parallels between the way game
content could be tweaked to fit ratings guidelines, and the
way that film directors were able to remove frames or frame
violence artistically so that disgusting or shocking acts
were alluded to rather than literally seen, the gap between
Teen and Mature ratings and the ESRB's awkwardness were a
source of agitation, he explained.

"They don't really tell you what they will object to - they
just say 'well, follow the standards that have been set
before', which is a problem if you want to push the
envelope," he added.

Despite this, Eggebrecht encouraged his fellow developers to
continue pushing against the boundaries of what was
acceptable in order to establish games as an artform. He
concluded: "I hope that we actually can prove that this is an
artform. Show me something that proves on all levels that
games are indeed an artform - push the violence, but also
push the sex, and push it in an artistic way where it's not
really gratuitous, but where it gets my thinking brain
going."